Friday, October 7, 2016

The most shocking part of Donald Trump’s tax records isn’t the $916 million loss everyone’s talking about

Despite what Donald Trump says, we really can learn a lot from his tax returns — even from the partial ones made public by The New York Times.

The major takeaway from the three pages of Trump’s 1995 returns that the Times made public is that Trump is right when he says the system is rigged. What he doesn’t say is that it’s rigged in his favor and in the favor of people like him — and against regular people, those of us who earn money, pay income tax on it, and financially support the country in which we live.

To keep things relatively simple, I’m telling you what I see in Trump’s returns, based on my decades of experience parsing financial filings. I will try not to get bogged down in numbers and technicalities.

Sure, the $900 million-plus of losses reported by the New York Times — losses that could be used to offset income for a total of 18 years — are totally shocking. Legal, yes. But shocking.

But there’s something I consider even more shocking — although it involves a much smaller number. ...